Friday, May 06, 2016

Potemkin news, I guess

Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has confessed that the Obama administration set up an "echo chamber" of "experts" to sell their deal with Iran. Well, I guess at least he's being honest about that, but one would think that any sane leader would understand that in light of the hazards of international affairs, an echo chamber is the very last thing anyone would want to have. People really should have been resigning in protest as they realized what was going on, because quite frankly, echo chambers in this kind of thing get people killed.

Even more embarrassing is the apparent fact is that they knew journalists were (either unknowingly or willingly) clueless, and that the Obama administration actually tried to keep adverse news off the wires until his SOTU address. They apparently nearly got away with it, too.

I don't know what you call people that fall for this line, but I do know you can't call them journalists. Or national security experts.

3 comments:

Iran's Shi'a theology, at least as described by those like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (sp?), is geared around the desire for the 12th Imam to come in a cataclysm of war. So having and using a nuclear weapon fits their ideology/theology in a way that it does not for Pakistan or Israel. Iran is also one of the world's preeminent sponsors of terrorism, and has lately had quite a run of Holocaust denial.

Make sense? I'm not terribly happy about Pakistan having nuclear weapons, either, but there are factors in Iran that would appear to make it a much more volatile situation.